9/20/2004 @ 12:00AM

Catch Me If You Can

Earl Washington has been making a mint selling woodblock prints he claims are the creation of his great-grandfather. Are they?

Who created the striking woodcuts that crowd the small studio in downtown Monroe, Mich.? It depends on what time of day you ask Earl Marshawn Washington, co-owner. A handsome 42-year-old, Washington attributes the works to his great-grandfather, a little-known African-American wood engraver named Earl Mack Washington, who lived from 1862 to 1952. Sometimes he speaks of his ancestor as having salvaged woodblocks from a fire-bombed print shop in midtown Manhattan in the 1880s; other times Great-Granddad becomes the engraver, as well as the printer, of some of the works.

Whatever the case, the art has proved a bonanza for Washington. Since 1998 as many as 60,000 Washington prints may have been sold on Ebay and at PBA Galleries in San Francisco and DuMouchelle’s in Detroit, among other venues, at prices ranging from $20 to $350. Vaughn (Pete) Baughman, owner of Frogtown Books in Toledo, Ohio, says he bought 5,000 to 7,000 prints, paying Washington $12 to $35 each, and resold 2,000 or so over the Internet.

They are simple, attractive, sometimes starkly rendered prints, reminiscent of German expressionist work, but often reflecting black American themes. They range in subject from broadsides for Harlem’s Cotton Club and expatriate dancer Josephine Baker to lynchings, the New Testament and erotica.

And to a widening ring of skeptics they are all fakes, created recently by the younger Washington. Some print-collecting lawyers and various art and book dealers have come to question whether Earl Mack Washington ever existed at all. The younger Washington hasn’t done much to deflect their suspicion. A former girlfriend has come forward with the allegation that the younger Washington cut and printed woodblocks himself or with the help of apprentices.

He concedes that he is the artist of some prints and has enhanced various images on others. His back office contains at least 200 printing presses; he has acknowledged to a trade group that he has printed on 19th-century presses. “I won’t challenge anything you say,” he insists to FORBES–but sticks to his story about his ancestor. While Washington admits to having recently done some prints himself, he says he never misrepresented his own works as those of his great-grandfather.

“Washington’s such a good liar,” says Baughman of Frogtown Books, who no longer believes the prints are authentic. “That’s what he does for a living.”

Art fraud, of course, is nothing new. Not long after Johannes Gutenberg invented a printing press with movable type, master artist Albrecht Dürer warned on the title page of his Life of the Virgin, a collection of stunning woodblock prints, “You thieves and imitators of other people’s labor and talents. Beware of laying your audacious hand upon this work.” More recently, audacious hands were laid on the works of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí (1904-89): A 1999 scam revealed that Dalí himself may have signed thousands of blank sheets on which lithographs by imitators were later printed.

The Washington prints are a smaller affair than the proliferating Dalís. But they suggest a perilous trend for unwary collectors. If the Washington oeuvre (or, rather, its antiquity) was faked, it was done on a large scale with an elaborately created pedigree. More dangerous yet is that the prints are still being sold over the Internet (no one is currently doing so through Ebay, though Washington says he will resume such sales). On the Net, dealers can offer fuzzy disclaimers, and buyers can’t examine the artwork up close.

If you are paying $50 for a nice-looking mail-order woodblock, maybe it doesn’t really matter whether it was run off in 1899 or 1999. But if you are buying what you think is an Andy Warhol, you ought to think long and hard about authenticity. As many as “10% to 15% of the submissions to the [Andy Warhol Art Authentication] Board are not by Warhol,” says Ronald D. Spencer of Frogtown Books LLP, in New York, which represents the board.

First to sense something odd about the Washington woodblocks was Kenneth Martens, a Calgary lawyer and art collector. Five years ago Martens accused Washington of forgery for selling woodcuts bearing the penciled initials of Eric Gill, a British artist known for erotic prints. “I own an original Eric Gill,” says Martens, “and when I saw the initials on the Washington [print] I knew they were wrong by comparing the two.” Martens doesn’t own any Washington prints, but three acquaintances do. One shared his misgivings about their genuineness–and Martens tried prompting various authorities to investigate, he says, to no avail. So he put up a Web site that posted circumstantial evidence contradicting Washington’s story.

Meantime, the M.C. Escher estate detected what it claimed were prints counterfeited by Washington and sold by him (and later Frogtown’s Baughman) on Ebay. Mark Veldhuysen, director of the M.C. Escher Co., complained loudly; Ebay promised to pull further listings. Veldhuysen also filed complaints of fraud against Washington with an FBI agent in the Sacramento, Calif. office. Why there? Because of information fingering Stacy Ortiz–a stripper who dances in Toledo clubs, the mother of two of Washington’s children and now his third wife–as a source of the fake Eschers. Ortiz does not deny selling Eschers, and says she bought Washington his first press. “I said I’d support him until we could make some money from his art,” she says, “even though at that time he had never even made a woodblock.”

Marc Freiman, a Washington, D.C. print collector, claims to have found no evidence of an Earl M. Washington after scouring census records in the National Archives. Others found no mention of him in the accounts of artists who supposedly had befriended him. FORBES came up empty checking the Social Security database. Washington claims that relevant documents on his ancestor were thrown out after a fire in his family’s house “in the late 1960s or early 1970s.” An expert on the works of art deco illustrator Rockwell Kent noted that a Washington print listed on Ebay by Baughman was actually a reversed image from a catalog of Kent’s work published in 1975–23 years after Washington’s alleged death.

It was Martens’ Web site that later made Thomas Pulsipher, a former Michigan state police officer, and his wife, Bethany, a onetime officer in the state’s Department of Natural Resources, second-guess their purchase from Washington of 82 prints for $1,640. He’d visited their shop, Prairie Home Antiques, in Schoolcraft, Mich. on June 17. Soon after, Tom phoned an FBI agent in Honolulu he had found on Martens’ site who was accumulating complaints on Washington. Tom was told to go to the Kalamazoo County sheriff. He swore out a criminal complaint against Washington, alleging fraud and misrepresentation. “I want him prosecuted,” he says. A law-enforcement source says that a Washington print has been sent by the FBI to its forensic lab to discover whether it is of recent origin.

One of Martens’ collector friends introduced him to John A. Stewart–an attorney, director of the Amity Art Foundation of Woodbridge, Conn. and a collector. An owner of 257 Washington prints and a couple of woodblocks, Stewart planned to set up an exhibit of works by Washington in October and put up a Web site to advertise the show. He then developed second thoughts. Washington, he says, refused to supply any genealogical proof of his family tree. He further infuriated Stewart by sending prints to auction houses with a copy of Stewart’s Web posting to “prove” their legitimacy. Stewart canceled the show, writing to Washington that “I believe you are not only the creator of the myth of the elder Mr. Washington, but the carver of the blocks that you attribute to the phantom,’” the phantom being the elder Washington. Washington the younger never responded. Asked about Stewart’s accusation, Washington accuses him of not paying Baughman for the prints and woodblocks. (Baughman says he’s owed no money.)

The most damning claims against Washington come from his former girlfriend–Terra Zavala, a 25-year-old Monroe hairdresser. In signed statements sent to Martens, Zavala alleges, among other things, that Washington trained her to cut woodblocks. She told FORBES that Frogtown’s Baughman “wanted more [African-American] pieces, so Earl took me to look for anything that might make a good print.” (Baughman confirms making the request.) “On one African-American print,” she says, “I saw Earl draw onto the block a face that was smiling with one tooth shaded in.” Zavala also claims that Washington told her he doesn’t really know who his great-grandfather was.

What does Washington say? He answers some questions, deflects others. Relaxing in his office, a book about the counterfeiting of Salvador Dalí prints on his desk, Washington admits, “I am the artist on some [Washington prints],” adding, “I cut them and make them available to people at affordable prices.” He also acknowledges altering some images that he originally claimed as the work of his ancestor, “just to keep people interested.” As for those questionable Eric Gill woodcuts, he says he “only signed about 10 or 15.” He claims that “experts” told him the prints were “real.”

Washington also concedes that he frequently seeks out blocks of maple wood suitable for carving. “I’m a crackpot inventor,” he says. Did he invent that great-grandfather? Absolutely not, he says.